A strong presence on social media is an essential competitive approach in today’s markets, where online shared experiences are becoming increasingly relevant to consumers. Creating a profile on social networks and occasionally posting messages is not enough. In order to ensure that you get the best results by capitalizing on online social media, it is important to know what your goals are and how you intend to achieve them. In other words, you need a strategy. A good social media strategy will be subordinated to the organization’s objectives, increase brand awareness, encourage customer loyalty, and reduce marketing costs, constituting an important competitive advantage. The social media strategy must include marketing objectives,
Some guidelines for understanding the concept:
- If social media presence is limited, conduct a survey among customers to find out how they use social media and use this information in structuring the strategy.
- Make sure the interactions are both ways and not just the company you work for provides information. Analyze how you can provide customers with an incentive to collaborate with you in social media activity and perform tests in this regard.
- Analyze how quickly the company responds when someone posts a message on the site. Set a reasonable response time for all interactions and make sure the responses are personal, not automatic or generic.
- Evaluate the customer comments posted on the site. Are they positive or negative? Identify ways to stimulate positive messages. Also consider how a negative message can turn into an opportunity to boost brand loyalty and build a reputation for excellent customer service.
APPROACH IN USING THE CONCEPT
There’s no generally valid approach to using social media tools successfully, but some basic principles apply to all platforms, brands and audiences. This eight-step plan will help you maximize your return on social media investments:
Step 1. Set social media goals.
The first step in developing the social media strategy is to identify the objectives (e.g., improving brand knowledge or customer relations, increasing traffic to the company’s website, marketing products or publicizing special offers, etc.).
Select two or three priority goals and focus on how you intend to use social media to achieve them.
Whatever the goals, they must be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. Decide how you will measure success (e.g., if you want to generate more sales opportunities, set a goal of a 25% increase; if you’re going to increase awareness of the organization or brand, set a number of posts/day or week, and set how many appreciations, distributions or comments you want to receive for each). If you want to improve your presence on social media, than you can contact with social media marketing services. They will provide you best social media marketing services.
Step 2. Assess the current situation.
If your company already uses social media, evaluate how the objectives are currently being met. Analyze which platforms are used and which ones have the greatest impact on the target audience. You don’t have to use them all, especially if you have a limited budget or time for social media. Analyze if the messages sent so far were in line with the objectives.
Are you connected to your target audience, or is it ignoring your messages? Use Google Analytics to review your post traffic and rank your posts by results.
Step 3: Know the target audience.
In order to establish a connection with the people in the target audience, you need to know their age, interests, occupations, income, passions, motivations, etc. This social, demographic, and psychographic information can help you identify the most appropriate social media platforms and create engaging messages for your target audience.
Step 4: Choose the right media channels
Choose the right media channels with your target audience profile and the image you want to create: Facebook offers the widest variety of potential users; LinkedIn is useful if you provide services for business professionals; Pinterest or Instagram are useful in areas such as interior design, fashion, etc.
Step 5 creation of the content.
The creation of the content must reflect the company’s image and the market and must be adapted to the social media platform used and the particularities of the target audience. Make sure that you provide value to the target audience through the published content, rewarding it for the allotted time. To identify the type of message that offers the best results, you can also analyze the policy promoted by famous brands (Taco Bell, Starbucks, KLM Airlines), which have a large number of followers on social networks, but keep in mind that their products are not similar. With yours. What works for them might not work so well for the company you are operating in. The key to success is experimenting with different types of content and analyzing statistics.
Step 6. Determine the frequency of posts.
Analyze and respect your target audience’s online habits, identify when they are most active, and when they might be interested in your message. Different time zones. Too high a frequency of posts will make the target audience feel harassed, but a low frequency can lead to a loss of interest in favor of competitors. It is important to be consistent, random posting can create the impression of disorganization or insecurity.
The best way to organize your messages is to create an editorial calendar that you can use to schedule posts and details (terms, network, content type, keywords, headlines, and status). The more detailed the calendar, the more efficient the company’s social media presence will be.
Step 7. Proper planning
Proper planning involves devoting time and human resources. Consider hiring a specialist in the field, a consultant, if you do not have such resources.
Step 8. Assessing progress and adapting strategy is very important in such a rapidly evolving environment:
- Use Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, etc. to identify the level at which the posts have met their objectives: number of views, number of clicks on the site, etc.
- Establish the way to measure the return on social media investments in order to make the results more tangible.
- Adapt your strategy frequently to trends and developments in the online environment or to audience feedback.